It did. That’s why I said Australia was burned at first and changed their policy.

(Actually the longest lockdown in Melbourne was the second one, but it was only a couple of weeks after the first, I misremembered it as being one continuous lockdown.)

Subsequent lockdowns were shorter than elsewhere in the world because they reacted faster.

For a city, yes - seven or eight on again / off again hard lockdowns with a total of 262 days(?) or so of stay in place isolation.

At the state level Western Australia continuously self isolated for something like 18 months with a 14 day quarantine period for anybody wanting to enter for longer than it takes to turn a truck around.

Very different types of lockdown for sure.

The lockdown was not spread equally. There were enough people just ignoring it.

Some having midnight parties because it was extra exciting to subvert the curfew, with incidental spreading of COVID.

Some were outright trying to have "herd immunity" parties to deliberately spread it.

And hence the official lockdown kept having to be extended.

Fuck I hated those people.

> You’re proving my point that people lost their minds.

Nah, minds were not lost. Italy simply had the bad luck to show us what "zero response" looked like.

> mostly normal person a bad flu

Nope.

Italy now: flu season for the year = ~3000 deaths

2020 Italy COVID for the year = ~74000 deaths

Bit of a difference. And that was with Italy also trying lockdowns and everything else once they realised how bad it was.

Kids here don't resent covid happened. If they resent it at your place, it is on adults. But of course it is not exactly the same as before, people adapted and carried some adaptation with them. I work a lot from home and I am not giving it up unless I really have to for example.

For years now, kids go to school as before, they go to do sports as before and those whose parents dont allow unlimited gaming meet each other in person.

> In other towns where community was weak, [...] things like reduced footfall and contribution shortages in community services have been used as a pretext to cut them entirely

That has nothing to do with covid or covid handling. This is about your community not wanting to pay community services regardless of covid.

Of course kids and young adults resent it: a part of their childhood and formative years sucked ass.

But the resentment isn’t towards the handling, it’s towards the reality. It sucks covid happened and it shouldn’t have. But there’s nothing that could have been done to save their youth; it was already ruined for those years.

I mean, if the lockdown didn’t happen and instead a few million more people died, would they have preferred that? I doubt it, especially considering such a situation would inevitably result in even stricter restrictions going forward. After all, lockdown was a reaction. If you make the thing it’s reacting to even bigger, even more of a problem, then… well… the reaction will be more extreme.

The lack of human connection has been a trend for many decades now, covid just accelerated it all at once. Not like there was much choice, lots of people died, we did what we had to.

The communities that did exist were always running on fumes, basically only existing due to inertia. When the inertia was cut, even if only for a couple weeks in some places, they were done. That’s it.

The social damage has been here, and we’ve been zombie-ing our way through it. Covid just let the undead stay dead, and turns out we can’t revive it.

And the massive damage this did to children's education. I think people who didn't have a child in the school system at the time might not understand how poorly the schools functioned during that time.

My child had two intelligent and supportive parents, including a stay-at-home mother, and it was still rough. Many of her classmates just flat-out lost a year of education. There's still obvious effects on her cohort years later.

Almost every single meetup group in Northern Virginia was completely destroyed and did not grow back. I watched as dozens of local meetups, several running for many years, disappeared over night. I managed one as well and my crew held on to ours for as long as we could. We managed to keep it running online for several more years. But the social damage was done. After running the thing for 12 years, not being able to find anywhere that was willing to host us in-person again, and all of us original organizers having moved to different cities, there was nobody willing to take over.

> Trivialising this to fear of vaccines misses the point.

We had concerted anti-vaccine campaign. Literally trying to make you feel afraid of vaccines or feel sorry for kids that might get them. And yes, it was fear spread by men who fancy themselves manly men.

> The lack of human communication being the new normal, cut friendships and shattered communities are the real killer here.

I am particularly salty about this one. Because the exact same ideological and political groups who are throwing complete temper tamptrum over lockdown are the ones who want women to be stay at home moms. I did not, lockdowns were easier, you had a lot more communication and everybody was in the same position so you could realate.

Lockdowns were an easy mode compare to the thing they want force women into.